warriors feel balanced, other classes currently are not. our uptime and mobility is the reason why ive never rerolled. we rarely get feared, and we have the most root breakers we have ever had since the beginning of wow.

we are a casters worst nightmare, worse than DK's currently. safeguard, demo banner and shockwave are pure gold for peels, especially when every team has some sort of pet its so easy to line up 20 second aoe stuns.

people cry utility but other than maybe a range interrupt, and intervene roots baseline we really dont need anything else.

and personally i like it when the shitters and the fotm fags go away, stay inactive and stay gone.

I feel like if they increased the cooldown on cheat death from 90 seconds to 2 minutes but in return made you immune to damage for 3 seconds it would actually be very good.
To be fair other classes "cheat deaths" are actually preventing you from dying for a few seconds but ours feels like it does nothing half the time.

There are a few of you asking me questions in my inbox, in-game and here on AJ. These questions include: "What rotations do you do?, What poisons do you use? Why this over this?" And so on. Here is a general guide on how I, Mvp the rogue plays mutilate. You may change any of the suggestions I have made to better fit your play style or hear your responses in regards to my guide. I understand a lot of you think that Sub is the best for PVP because of all the control you have. While this is some what true, Mut also has it's amazing advantages.

A lot of players haven't played mutilate in arenas because they have not figured out on how to play it. Here are the main points I will be making in this guide:

1) Talent Specialization:
Talent Specialization is something that anybody can make up to their own style/spec. It gives you the freedom of changing what is needed before the arena starts due to certain comps. Here is a quick talent tree of what I am using: http://www.wowhead.c...talent#r!md|Isu

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The first tier for rogues gives you special abilities in your stealth. As assassination, I used to go with Shadow Focus due to the energy regen for assassination is terrible, but I realized how to fix this. Most sub players use this and I would like for more assassination rogues to as well. The reason why I went with Subterfuge is because it allows you to be able to use more stealth abilities after your initial opener (We all already know this, since most of us already play with it).

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The second tier is more or less to take in less damage/stopping damage. I chose Combat Readiness because of it's utilities against melee/dps teams creating a "Wall" for us rogues. If you were facing caster teams, of course you would use Deadly Throw.

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Almost the same as the second tier. Takes in less damage/gives health. I prefer elusiveness because who wouldn't want 30% less damage all around.

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Now comes the real fun, this talent with Subterfuge is one of the most used talent tiers in the game as a rogue at the moment. If you already know how to play this as a Sub rogue, then assassination openers will be a breeze for you. This is probably the best thing that has happened for assassination. Cloak and Dagger allows you to be able to use your abilities 25 yards away. Which makes Shadowstep useless and burst of speed. Especially with how assassination works. Assassination is all about bleeds/poisons. I will get into the rotations a bit later, but the reason why you pick this over ShS or Burst of Speed is because of the freedom you have to CC/Bleed up your opponents. This ability alone will bring back the necessary CC that you need from Sub into Assassination.

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This tier really depends on what you're playing. For 2's/duels, I prefer playing with Dirty Tricks over Prey because of the ability of being able to blind over your DoTs. Also, gouge is now 0 energy, which allows you to spam one mutilate the very most, but for threes, I still prefer of Prey on the Weak combined with Tricks, it does a large amount of damage boost to your partners.

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This last tier is all based on the kind of opponents you are facing. I see a lot of rogues using Marked for Death, while it is a good talent, it's terrible for Assassination. Reasons? Marked for death may give you an instant 5 combo points, but assassination generates combo points fairly easy. You may want to save these combo points for your Recup/Ruptures. Which is why Anticipation is amazing. Allows the use of your combo points where it's needed. I mostly use anticipation for melee/dps teams. I usually choose ST for caster teams because it's a troll move and it hits harder than icelances which mages usually cry about.

2) Glyphs:
I use a rotation of these five:

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Glyph of CoS: dmg reduction vs Melee Cleaves

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Glyph of Stealth: For quicker stealth's to be able to restart my openers/cc's), people ask why Stealth? In arena's it does help a lot because as soon as you use your first ability, stealth goes on CD meaning you have 3 seconds to try and get behind a wall and with this glyph, it allows you to be able to get that re-stealth quicker. So you can Vanish, open, hide and gain the stealth quicker rather than being Faerie Fired through the fucking walls while waiting for stealth to come off cooldown.

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Glyph Of Garrote: That extra silence helps, especially since you will be mass spamming garrote anyways.

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Glype of Shadow Walk: Against other rogues. Assassination will destroy a sub rogue if he gets the opener.

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Glyph Of Feint: Against caster teams. Most caster teams will try and kite you, so having this will help with damage reduction.

3) Poisons:
Deadly and Mind Numbing: Why? Deadly causes a lot of damage with Mastery, you'll learn why in the next section. Mind Numbing? You as a rogue should already know. No reason to explain this one.

Did some more calcs with a certain level of assumption considering i don't have damage sources % so i did it just based on poison damage only. Worked out the sweet spot for Mastery being 79.5% before you start loosing too much AP and Crit from your agility gems\enchants.

Gems:

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Wondering what you should gem as an assassination rogue? There are three main gems for an assassination rogue. I've been messing around with how it works and I've come to realize that Agility/Mastery are the main gems needed. I am also gemming for socket bonuses.

Why so much mastery you may be asking? Well, mastery affects your poison damage as assassination. At the moment, I am running with 71% mastery:

That is 71% more damage that I am doing with my poisons on other players. I am usually seeing between 20k - 50k deadly poison ticks. Now add this damage to mutilate, dispatch, envenom and your garrote/rupture ticks. It's a lot of damage.

Reforging:

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I normally reforge anything that is not needed. These three, are the main ones and I'm still over capped with them being reforged. If your gear already has mastery on it, reforge to crit; if it doesn't have mastery, reforge to mastery. Remember to always stay at the hit cap and expertise cap for PVP. Haste doesn't have much affect unless you have SnD up.

Enchanting:

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Helm - Trololo, Blizzard removed helm enchants.

Neck - ^

Back - Superior Critical Strike

Chest - Super Stats or Resil (I prefer resil, at high rating arenas, that extra bit of resil will help)

Shirt - Nude

Tabard - It has to be pink for assassination to work.

Armwraps (Bracers) - You can either do 140 Agil or 170 Mastery. You really don't notice much of a difference in damage wise, but I see Mastery affect my poisons more of course. I usually choose mastery for my multi dotting.

Hands - Superior Mastery

Legs - Shadowleather Leg Armor

Boots - You can go either Blurred Speed (180 Agil + Speed) or Pandaren Step (170 Mastery + Speed); I choose Agil to help the damage output from Mutilate and Dispatch.

5) Rotations:

I won't be giving away all my secrets, but I will teach a few for the newer rogues that just recently changed to mutilate. I have two main keybinds/macros in my stealth bar. These two are what will make the game a bit life changing and will make or break you playing assassination rogue.

Macros:

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#showtooltip
/cast [@Arena1] Garrote

#showtooltip
/cast [@Arena2] Garrote

#showtooltip
/cast [@Arena3] Garrote

3's

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Normally in three's it's a bit different, sap one, and garrote the other two. Why? Because garrote automatically applies Venomous Wounds and Deadly Poison. This gives you +10 energy every Nature damage tick(Deadly Poison tick). So now you have two targets that have Dots, you're now gaining +20 energy every tick (This does not work if the person with bleeds have an asorb on them), but you're also causing huge damage by DoTs because of your mastery being so high. So you're now basically a Shadow Priest, Afflicition Warlock and all other DoT classes. Only difference is, you have three DoTs( Rupture and/or Garotte, Deadly Poison and any extra damage that comes out of Venemous Wounds). Now you have damage all over the map.

You only need to put 1 combo point into Slice and Dice because after you envenom for the first time, your Slice and Dice automatically gets renewed.

Your opener is important because assassination openers have really nice pressure output. You can literally bring any class from 100% - 20% within the opener (No Burst). So you have to be mindful of how you play assassination and pay attention to your energy because you will run out fast with Mutilate being 55 energy. Normally openers in 3's look like this:

Sap > Arena1, Garrote > Arena2/3, CS > Kill target, SnD, Mutilate > Mutilate > Rupture. After this opening rotation, you can do anything you like, either refresh your Dots across the map or CC through out the map. Vanish > Garrote all the map or CS all the map. Depending how the game is going. Now you have the necessary CC from Sub in Mutilate because of Subterfuge/CnD.

I normally just redirect > rupture to refresh DoTs because it's just much simpler and use my vanish for their opening burst which allows me to open all over again and apply dots all over again. Assassination also has a lot of pressure output. Now with having damage scattered across the map, you can focus on your kill target.

Kill target/Burst: Vendetta/Trinket First > Shadow Blades after. Burst should only be used when you're about to do a kill. Why? Because Assassination does a lot of damage outside of it's burst anyways. On top of it, Vendetta is 2min's long and Shadow Blades is 3mins. You can trinket every minute if you want. I have these three cooldowns in a cast sequence/reset of 40 macro. Trinket being the first cast in the cast sequence.

The use of Dispatch, when dispatch does that bright thingy, use it after you use a Combo Point Quencher, it will give you a free combo point/no energy used/dmg. Spam dispatch after the person is 30% less health. Very low in energy (20) and it hits like an ambush. It will also generate quick combo points for those nice 5point envenoms that hit like a truck.

2's

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Remember when I said I use different tiers for different brackets? This is why garrote the entire map and start on the kill target, blind the other, blind won't break because of "Dirty Tricks" Which in the end of the blind, your bleeds may have already done about 15% damage extra to the "blinded" target, which already backs him up from healing his partner/himself, but you get the picture.

Kill target/Burst: Vendetta/Trinket First > Shadow Blades after. Burst should only be used when you're about to do a kill. Why? Because Assassination does a lot of damage outside of it's burst anyways. On top of it, Vendetta is 2min's long and Shadow Blades is 3mins. You can trinket every minute if you want. I have these three cooldowns in a cast sequence/reset of 40 macro. Trinket being the first cast in the cast sequence.

The use of Dispatch, when dispatch does that bright thingy, use it after you use a Combo Point Quencher, it will give you a free combo point/no energy used/dmg. Spam dispatch after the person is 30% less health. Very low in energy (20) and it hits like an ambush. It will also generate quick combo points for those nice 5point envenoms that hit like a truck.

Well, it was a quick and short guide on how to play assassination in my eyes, but so far it's been the best playstyle(2300 in 3's, but I barely play the team and I'm trying to find a new comp to play for shits and giggles). You can take this guide and change anything you like to your playstyle, but this is mostly for more beginner mutilate players. I've played Sub and Mutilate during most of my seasons, but I prefer to just stick to Mut these next few seasons. Kind of tired of playing Sub, but if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. I hope I make sense, I normally visit AJ during work, so this guide was written during my work hours ^^;

Only thing that ever needed nerf is burst, specifically eviscerate
No one would even care that you cant DIRECTLY peel rogue for 3 seconds (although obviously almost any class can peel indirectly).
Lets not forget that subterfuge is great survivability talent which isnt something rogues can spare and it feels very rogueish and not some passive mitigation warrior-like sht.

As for c&d at the current state of the game it doesnt even feel that OP. I mean its possibly too strong on openers but i wouldnt like to drop it while dancing because, well, dance is the only thing that is scary about rogues atm and its not too hard to peel / use sht during those 6 seconds so cnd helping in that department.

I mean, obviously it feels hard because rogues do stupid amount of damage even through defensive cds, but thats not the fault of cnd or subterfuge. Its like... if rogue is lucky he can literally double evis through cds for like 80% of your hp and in this topic people go "ye, prolly subterfuge and cnd are stupid and too op". Ye, sure, its all subterfuge's fault ><

Sry bout that, misread it. Still a shorter cd would be dumb if u could still teleport to a friendly target and let em heal u up to max. Yes u can do that with warriors aswell, but warriors doesnt have vanish etc to help em out (just throwing it out there).

2minute cd on vanish lol ,warriors have other things to mitigate damage. IE heroic leap across map intervine to their partner heal them max. Having 2 gap closers as a rogue would be balanced aswell as shs being usable while rooted.

@Conviq: 95% of all rogues prefer to play sub, but we had long times in rogue history where other specs were played.

@Nadagast: You forget about the nerfs to the comps. Rogues do not fit into every comp in the game and while I understand the hate for the current rogue comps - it's not like RMP or RLS will make a comeback with 5.3. RPS will be weaker overall than in 5.1 and Thugcleave has many minor nerfs combined with buffs to classes like Paladins, Warriors and Locks (Portal not counterable and Thug does not have the time to kill it). While the inidividual skills need adjustment the package has to work. And balance wise I think it's smarter to do nerfs in steps and not nerf many different things without playtesting it extensively. We have seen this several times in the past and it never worked well if too many things were changed at once. Damage was nerfed (Shuriken Toss, PvP Power, Find Weakness), control was nerfed (Glyph of Cheap Shot, Glyph of Garrote), mobility was nerfed (Cloak and Dagger), comps were nerfed (Shadow Priests and BM Hunters).

Regarding Subterfuge
The problem without Subterfuge are too easy peels. Our burst is timed and a lot of things need to be aligned (DRs, procs, TotT, LoS, mobility cooldowns like Blink) because we only have small windows in which we deal damage that isn't easily outhealed. If Double Grip and things like Blazing Speed + Blink are toned down I agree with the change. The problem is that it's actually super easy to counter rogue burst outside of Smoke Bomb / Cloak / Subterfuge. Most people don't seem to know: Shadow Dance cancels the Subterfuge stealth as well as the onUse trinket. Two Eviscerates during Subterfuge only works with Shadowblades & Marked for Death by the way.

Regarding Shadowstep
Strong ability but the cooldown is too long. With Shadowstep on Preparation things were different in S11. We could use a major cooldown to connect again if needed. And unlike now in S11 we had damage with Backstab outside of the burst windows. This is why I think that we need a small buff to rogue mobility. Hit and Run is a solid idea for example. The cooldown would need to be discussed of course.

There are a ton of potentially overpowered abilities in the game. Rogues took several nerfs, rogue partner classes took several nerfs and rogues are probably hit more than any other class by the PvP Power nerf.

The abilitiy was obviously not over the top in 5.1 when Subterfuge, the exact same talent, wasn't taken by many of the highest rated rogues.

If all special snowflakes are removed the game becomes boring. And if Subterfuge is gone we will have the dance in the opener, probably with Marked for Death and a nearly full energy bar due to Shadow Focus. Rogues will have to rely on extremely strong dances and if they can't force the healer trinket in the opener the game is lost.

Subterfuge and Shuriken Toss make the burst smaller, divide it instead of creating these 7 seconds of doom every minute. Subterfuge opens up new options with restealths and Shuriken Toss gives options to deal damage while being kited. Like this the class has a solid toolkit. I doubt you will enjoy playing against rogues that turtle for 50 seconds, run around pillars and then go out with all cooldowns and procs. This is already a playstyle that is shitty but effective and any changes to these talents will emphazize that playstyle even more.

Let 5.3 play out for a bit and I'm pretty confident that the nerfs were big enough (especially when looking at the hunter and spriest nerfs that came along). If rogues should still be over the top, Subterfuge can be tuned down.

But one more time for everyone: 5.1 rogues were considered to be bad. They had Subterfuge back then.

theres actually so many ways to keep a rogue from restealthing or atleast delay it for a decent period of time. People these days don't pay attention to the little things anymore. It's all about THE BIG SWIFTY'S MANG

I have had so many times where people just let me restealth in their god damn faces after a clone or whatnot and THEN people whine about subterfuge being OP since the rogue has his "mini shadow dance" every time he restealths. Subterfuge is partially so good because people are all to shit to actually prevent the most basic thing a rogue wants to do, PARTIALLY.